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The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

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Tag: privacy

Prominent academics, experienced engineers, and professionals published an open letter to Congress yesterday, stating their opposition to CISPA and other overly broad cybersecurity bills. Highlight:

We take security very seriously, but we fervently believe that strong computer and network security does not require Internet users to sacrifice their privacy and civil liberties. The bills currently under consideration, including Rep. Rogers’ Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523) and Sen. McCain’s SECURE IT Act (S. 2151), are drafted to allow entities who participate in relaying or receiving Internet traffic to freely monitor and redistribute those network communications. The bills nullify current legal protections against wiretapping and similar civil liberties violations for that kind of broad data sharing. By encouraging the transfer of users’ private communications to US Federal agencies, and lacking good public accountability or transparency, these “cybersecurity” bills unnecessarily trade our civil liberties for the promise of improved network security.

In the late stages of a legislative battle, it often comes down to “talking points.” Whoever puts out the message that sticks wins the debate—damn the substance.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) is prioritizing talking points over substance if a CQ report about a speech he gave to the Ripon Society is accurate. (He put it up on his Web site, from which one could infer endorsement. Rogers is not a cosponsor of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, so let’s not have the government taking down the house.gov domain just now, mkay?)

From the report:

“We’re finding language we can agree on,” he said in a speech to the Ripon Society, a moderate Republican group. “Are we going to agree on everything? Probably not. They don’t want anything, anytime, ever.” But, Rogers said, he hopes to give the groups “language that at least allows them to sleep at night, because I can’t sleep at night over these threats.”

This seems to suggest that a few tweaks to language, well in the works with the privacy community, will make his version of cybersecurity legislation a fait accompli. I’m a keen observer of the privacy groups, and I see no evidence that this is so. The bill is so broadly written that it is probably unrepairable.

And that is a product of Congress’s approach to this problem: Congress does not know how to address the thousands of difference problems that fall under the umbrella term “cybersecurity,” so it has fixed on promiscuous (and legally immunized) “information sharing” with government security agencies as the “solution.” Privacy can rightly be traded for other goods such as security, but with no benefits discernible from wanton information sharing, one shouldn’t expect sign-off from the privacy community.

That is not actually the message of the privacy community, who, on average, trust the government more than most conservatives and libertarians. The mainstream privacy community probably would accept highly regulatory and poorly formed cybersecurity legislation if it had enough privacy protections. But Rogers’ talking points try to push privacy folk onto the “unreasonable” part of the chess board, saying, “They don’t want anything, anytime, ever.”

That’s closer to my view than anything the orthodox privacy advocates are saying. Cybersecurity is not an area where the federal government can do much to help. But even I said in my 2009 testimony to the House Science Committee that the federal government has a role in improving cybersecurity: being a smart consumer that influences technology markets for the better.

What Representative Rogers—and all advocates for cybersecurity legislation—have failed to do is to make the affirmative case for their bills. “I can’t sleep at night” is not an answer to the case, carefully made by Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at Cato’s recent Hill briefing, that the threat from cyberattacks is overblown.

Someone finally decided to examine “cybercrime” statistics, and here’s what they found:

The cybercrime surveys we have examined exhibit [a] pattern of enormous, unverified outliers dominating the data. In some, 90 percent of the estimate appears to come from the answers of one or two individuals. In a 2006 survey of identity theft by the Federal Trade Commission, two respondents gave answers that would have added $37 billion to the estimate, dwarfing that of all other respondents combined. This is not simply a failure to achieve perfection or a matter of a few percentage points; it is the rule, rather than the exception. Among dozens of surveys, from security vendors, industry analysts and government agencies, we have not found one that appears free of this upward bias.

You see, cybercrime statistics have been generated using surveys of individuals and businesses, but you can’t generate valid numerical results that way. An opinion poll’s errors will naturally cancel out—there are a roughly equal number of wrongly stated “thumbs-up”s and “thumbs-down”s.

When you ask people to estimate losses, though, they can never estimate less than zero, so errors will always push results to the high side. High-side errors extrapolated society-wide drive the perception that cybercrime is out of control.

There are more drivers of excess insecurity than just bad loss estimates. There are also data breach notification laws, which require data holders to report various kinds of personal data spillage. These reports are the high-tech, grown-up version of a favorite schoolyard taunt: “Your epidermis is showing!” Epidermis is, of course, a scientific name for skin. It often doesn’t matter that one’s epidermis is showing. The questions are: What part of the epidermis? And what social or economic consequences does it have?

Most breached data is put to no use whatsoever. A 2005 study of data breaches found the highest fraudulent misuse rate for all breaches under examination to be 0.098 percent—less than one in 1,000 identities. (The Government Accountability Office concurs that misuse of breached data is rare.) Larger breaches tend to have lower misuse rates, which makes popular reporting on gross numbers of personal data breaches misleading. Identity frauds are limited by the time and difficulty of executing them, not by access to data.

It undoubtedly does, but security is not costless, and money driven to data security measures comes from other uses that might do more to make consumers better off. More importantly, though, data breach agitation and distended crime statistics have joined with other cybersecurity hype to generate a commitment in Congress to pass cybersecurity legislation.

Cybersecurity bills pending in both the House and Senate could have gruesome consequences for privacy because of “information sharing” provisions that immunize companies sharing data with the government for cybersecurity purposes. The potential for a huge, lawless cyberspying operation is significant if anyone can feed data to the government free of liability, including the privacy protections in property law, torts, and contract. Congress would not improve things by regulating in the name of cybersecurity, and it just might make things a lot worse.

It is ironic that overwrought claims about cybercrime and data breach could be privacy’s undoing, but they just might.

When the 1940 census was collected, the public was reassured that the information it gathered would be kept private. “No one has access to your census record except you,” the public was told. President Franklin Roosevelt said: “There need be no fear that any disclosure will be made regarding any individual or his affairs.”

Apparently the limits of what the government can do with census information have their limits. Today the 1940 census goes online.

When the Census Bureau transferred the data to the National Archives, it agreed to release of the data 72 years after its collection. So much for those privacy promises.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans can find a direct family link to one or more of the 132+ million people listed on those rolls. The 1940 census included 65 questions, with an additional 16 questions asked of a random 5 percent sample of people. You can find out what your father did, how much he made, or if he was on the dole. You may be able to find out if your mother had an illegitimate child before she married your father.

To be sure, this data will open a fascinating trove for researchers into life 70 years ago. But the Federal Trade Commission would not recognize a “fascinating trove” exception if a private company were to release data it had collected under promises of confidentiality.

Government officials endlessly point the finger at the private sector for being a privacy scourge. Senator Al Franken did last week in a speech to the American Bar Association last week (text; Fisking). He’s the chairman of a Senate subcommittee dedicated to examining the defects in private sector information practices. Meanwhile, the federal government is building a massive data and analysis center to warehouse information hoovered from our private communications, and the Obama Administration recently extended to five years the amount of time it can retain private information about Americans under no suspicion of ties to terrorism.

Marcus has the bare minimum lesson to take from this episode: “Remember this in 2020.”

Back in July of last year, I wrote about a case in the Supreme Court called FAA v. Cooper. In that Privacy Act case, a victim of a government privacy invasion had alleged “actual damages” based on evidence of mental and emotional distress.

Cooper, a recreational pilot who was HIV-positive, had chosen to conceal his health status generally, but revealed it to the Social Security Administration for the purposes of pursuing disability payments. When the SSA revealed that he was HIV-positive to the Department of Transportation, which was investigating pilot’s licenses in the hands of the medically unfit, the SSA violated the Privacy Act. Cooper claimed that he suffered mental and emotional distress at learning of the disclosure of his health status and inferentially his sexual orientation, which he had kept private.

The question before the Court was whether the Privacy Act’s grant of compensation for “actual damages” included damages for mental and emotional distress. This week the Court held … distressingly … [sorry, I had to] … NO. Under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, the Privacy Act has to be explicit about providing compensation for mental and emotional distress. Justice Alito wrote for a Court divided 5-3 along traditional ideological lines (Justice Kagan not participating).

The decision itself is a nice example of two sides contesting how statutory language should be interpreted. My preference would have been for the Court to hold that the Privacy Act recognizes mental and emotional distress. After all, a privacy violation is the loss of confident control over information, which, depending on the sensitivity and circumstances, can be very concerning and even devastating.

The existence of harm is a big elephant in the privacy room. Many advocates seem to be trying to lower the bar in terms of what constitutes harm, arguing that the creation of a risk is a harm or that worrisome information practices are harmful. But I think harm rises above doing things someone might find “worrisome.” Harm may occur, as in this case, when one’s (hidden) HIV status and thus sexual orientation is revealed. Harm has occurred when one records and uploads to the Internet another’s sexual activity. But I don’t think it’s harmful if a web site or ad network gathers from your web surfing that you’ve got an interest in outdoor sports.

The upshot of Cooper is this: Congress can and should amend the Privacy Act so that the damages it must compensate when it has harmed someone include real and proven mental and emotional distress.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a report today calling on companies “to adopt best privacy practices.” In related news, most people support airline safety… The report also “recommends that Congress consider enacting general privacy legislation, data security and breach notification legislation, and data broker legislation.”

This is regulatory cheerleading of the same kind our government’s all-purpose trade regulator put out a dozen years ago. In May of 2000, the FTC issued a report finding “that legislation is necessary to ensure further implementation of fair information practices online” and recommending a framework for such legislation. Congress did not act on that, and things are humming along today without top-down regulation of information practices on the Internet.

By “humming along,” I don’t mean that all privacy problems have been solved. (And they certainly wouldn’t have been solved if Congress had passed a law saying they should be.) “Humming along” means that ongoing push-and-pull among companies and consumers is defining the information practices that best serve consumers in all their needs, including privacy.

Congress won’t be enacting legislation this year, and there doesn’t seem to be any groundswell for new regulation in the next Congress, though President Obama’s reelection would leave him unencumbered by future elections and so inclined to indulge the pro-regulatory fantasies of his supporters.

The TSA’s response yesterday to a video challenging strip-search machines was so weak that it acts as a virtual confession to the fact that objects can be snuck through them.

In the video, TSA strip-search objector Jonathan Corbett demonstrates how he put containers in his clothes along his sides where they would appear the same as the background in TSA’s displays. TSA doesn’t refute that it can be done or that Corbett did it in his demonstration. More at Wired’s Threat Level blog.

More than six months ago, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals required the Transportation Security Administration to commence a rulemaking to justify its strip-search machine/prison-style pat-down policy. TSA has not done so. The result is that the agency still does not have a sturdy security system in place at airports. It’s expensive, inconvenient, error-prone, and privacy-invasive.

Making airline security once again the responsibility of airlines and airports would vastly improve the situation, because these actors are naturally inclined to blend security, cost-control, and convenience with customer service and comforts, including privacy.

I have a slight difference with Corbett’s characterization of the problem. The weakness of body scanners does not put the public at great danger. The chance of anyone exploiting this vulnerability and smuggling a bomb on board a domestic U.S. flight is very low. The problem is that these machines impose huge costs in dollars and privacy that do not foreclose a significant risk any better than the traditional magnetometer.

Corbett is right when he urges people to “demand of your legislators and presidential candidates that they get rid of this eight billion-dollar-a-year waste known as the TSA and privatize airport security.”